"You"re alive," Thorvald stated bleakly. "Garth"s dead. You ought to be dead too."
Shann drew back, rubbed sand from his hands, his concern dampened by the other"s patent hostility. Only that angry accusation vanished in a blink of those gray eyes. Then there was a warmer recognition in Thorvald"s expression.
"Lantee!" The younger man might just have come into sight. "What are you doing here?"
Shann tightened his belt. "Just about what you are." He was still aloof, giving no acknowledgment of difference in rank now. "Running around in this fog hunting the way out."
Thorvald sat up, surveying the billowing walls of the hole which contained them. Then he reached out a hand to draw fingers down Shann"s forearm.
"You _are_ real," he observed simply, and his voice was warm, welcoming.
"Don"t bet on it," Shann snapped. "The unreal can be mighty real--here."
His hand went up to the smarting brand on his shoulder.
Thorvald nodded. "Masters of illusion," he murmured.
"Mistresses," Shann corrected. "This place is run by a gang of pretty smart witches."
"Witches? You"ve seen them? Where? And what--who are they?" Thorvald pounced with a return of his old-time sharpness.
"They"re females right enough, and they can make the impossible happen.
I"d say that cla.s.sifies them as witches. One of them tried to take me over back on the island. I set a trap and caught her; then somehow she transported me----" Swiftly he outlined the chain of events leading from his sudden awakening in the river tunnel to his present penetration of this fog-world.
Thorvald listened eagerly. When the story was finished, he rubbed his hands across his drawn face, smearing away the last of the sand. "At least you have some idea of who they are and a suggestion of how you got here. I don"t remember that much about my own arrival. As far as I can remember I went to sleep on the Island and woke up here!"
Shann studied him and knew that Thorvald was telling the truth. He could remember nothing of his departure in the outrigger, the way he had fought Shann in the lagoon. The Survey officer must have been under the control of the Warlockians then. Quickly he gave the older man his version of the other"s actions in the outer world and Thorvald was clearly astounded, though he did not question the facts Shann presented.
"They just _took_ me!" Thorvald said in a husky half whisper. "But why?
And why are we here? Is this a prison?"
Shann shook his head. "I think all this"--a wave of his hand encompa.s.sed the green wall, what lay beyond it, and in it--"is a test of some kind.
This dream business.... A little while ago I got to thinking that I wasn"t here at all, that I might be dreaming it all. Then I met you."
Thorvald understood. "Yes, but this _could_ be a dream meeting. How can we tell?" He hesitated, almost diffidently, before he asked: "Have you met anyone else here?"
"Yes." Shann had no desire to go into that.
"People out of your past life?"
"Yes." Again he did not elaborate.
"So did I." Thorvald"s expression was bleak; his encounters in the fog must have proved no more pleasant than Shann"s. "That suggests that we do trigger the hallucinations ourselves. But maybe we can really lick it now."
"How?"
"Well, if these phantoms are born of our memories there are about only two or three we could see together--maybe a Throg on the rampage, or that hound we left back in the mountains. And if we do sight anything like that, we"ll know what it is. On the other hand, if we stick together and one of us sees something that the other can"t ... well, that fact alone will explode the ghost."
There was sense in what he said. Shann aided the officer to his feet.
"I must be a better subject for their experiments than you," the older man remarked ruefully. "They took me over completely at the first."
"You were carrying that disk," Shann pointed out. "Maybe that acted as a focusing lens for whatever power they use to make us play trained animals."
"Could be!" Thorvald brought out the cloth-wrapped bone coin. "I still have it." But he made no move to pull off the bit of rag about it.
"Now"--he gazed at the wall of green--"which way?"
Shann shrugged. Long ago he had lost any idea of keeping a straight course through the murk. He might have turned around any number of times since he first walked blindly into this place. Then he pointed to the packet Thorvald held.
"Why not flip that?" he asked. "Heads, we go that way--" he indicated the direction in which they were facing--"tails, we do a rightabout-face."
There was an answering grin on Thorvald"s lips. "As good a guide as any we"re likely to find here. We"ll do it." He pulled away the twist of cloth and with a swift snap, reminiscent of that used by the Warlockian witch to empty the bowl of sticks, he tossed the disk into the air.
It spun, whirled, but--to their open-jawed amazement--it did not fall to the sand. Instead it spun until it looked like a small globe instead of a disk. And it lost its dead white for a glow of green. When that glow became dazzling for Terran eyes the miniature sun swung out, not in orbit but in straight line of flight, heading to their right.
With a m.u.f.fled cry, Thorvald started in pursuit, Shann running beside him. They were in a tunnel of the fog now, and the pace set by the spinning coin was swift. The Terrans continued to follow it at the best pace they could summon, having no idea of where they were headed, but each with the hope that they finally did have a guide to lead them through this place of confusion and into a sane world where they could face on more equal terms those who had sent them there.
14. ESCAPE
"Something ahead!" Thorvald did not slacken the pace set by the brilliant spot of green they trailed. Both of the Terrans feared to fall behind, to lose touch with that guide. Their belief that somehow the traveling disk would bring them to the end of the mist and its attendant illusions had grown firmer with every foot of ground they traversed.
A dark, fixed point, now partly veiled by mist, lay beyond, and it was toward that looming half-shadow that the spinning disk hurtled. Now the mist curled away to display its bulk--larger, blacker and four or five times Thorvald"s height. Both men stopped short, for the disk no longer played pathfinder. It still whirled on its axis in the air, faster and faster, until it appeared to be throwing off sparks, but the sparks faded against a monolith of dark rock unlike the native stone they had seen elsewhere. For it was neither red nor warmly brown, but a dull, dead black. It could have been a huge stone slab, trimmed, smoothed, set up on end as a monument or marker, except that only infinite labor could have accomplished such a task, and there was no valid reason for such toil as far as the Terrans could perceive.
"This is it." Thorvald moved closer.
By the disk"s action, they deduced that their guide had drawn them to this featureless black steel with the precision of a beam-controlled ship. However, the purpose still eluded them. They had hoped for some exit from the territory of the veil, but now they faced a solid slab of dark stone, neither a conventional exit or entrance, as they proved by circling its base. Beneath their boots was the eternal sand, around them the fog.
"Now what?" Shann asked. They had made their trip about the slab and were back again where the disk whirled with unceasing vigor in a shower of emerald sparks.
Thorvald shook his head, scanning the rock face before them glumly. The eagerness had gone out of his expression, a vast weariness replacing it.
"There must have been some purpose in coming here," he replied, but his tone had lost the a.s.surance of moments earlier.
"Well, if we strike away from here, we"ll just get right back in again."
Shann waved a hand toward the mist, waiting as if with a hunter"s watch upon them. "And we certainly can"t go down." He dug a boot toe into the sand to demonstrate the folly of that. "So, what about up?"
He ducked under the spinning disk to lay his hands against the surface of the giant slab. And in so doing he made a discovery, revealed to his touch although hidden from sight. For his fingers, running aimlessly across the cold, slightly uneven surface of the stone, slipped into a hollow, quite a deep hollow.
Excited, half fearing that his sudden guess might be wrong, Shann slid his hand higher in line with that hollow, to discover a second. The first had been level with his chest, the second perhaps eighteen inches or so above. He jumped, to draw his fingers down the rock, with damage to his nails but getting his proof. There _was_ a third niche, deep enough to hold more than just the toe of a boot, and a fourth above that....
"We"ve a ladder of sorts here," he reported. Without waiting for any answer from Thorvald, Shann began to climb. The holds were so well matched in shape and size that he was sure they could not be natural; they had been bored there for use--the use to which he was now putting them--a ladder to the top of the slab. Though what he might find there was beyond his power to imagine.
The disk did not rise. Shann pa.s.sed that core of light, climbing above it into the greater gloom. But the holes did not fail him; each was waiting in a direct line with its companion. And to an active man the scramble was not difficult. He reached the summit, glanced around, and made a quick grab for a secure handhold.
Waiting for him was no level platform such as he had confidently expected to find. The surface up which he had just made his way fly-fashion was the outer wall of a well or chimney. He looked down now into a pit where black nothingness began within a yard of the top, for the radiance of the mist did not penetrate far into that descent.